With the new ability within OpManager to monitor our VMware ESXi hosts, we now have a quick portal to check in on our virtual machines/hosts and our physical servers as well, from one simple interface.

- Ryon Brubaker,
Information Systems Manager, Kemba Credit Union Inc.

VMware monitoring with OpManager

Start monitoring VMware servers right away (needs no configuration)

The VMware Monitor discovers and monitors without placing any overhead on your VMware servers - a single-step process that asks for the VMware server Host name & its HTTPS credentials is all that’s needed to discover, map and monitor all the VMs in a host.

Be alerted when resource consumption crosses critical thresholds

Over 30 critical availability and performance monitors are pre-configured with thresholds, waiting for you to only assign notification profiles whenever they are crossed. Alert mechanisms include via SMS, email, web alarms, RSS feed and Twitter DMs. You can even set-up auto-remediation actions through custom scripts e.g. restart a Windows service in the VM instance when CPU allocated crosses 90%.

Know which ESX servers are running low on resources

The ‘Top Hosts’ listing based on CPU consumption, Swap Memory consumption etc. brings immediate focus on the ‘unhealthy’ ESX servers. Administrators can then open up individual ESX server dashboards to further investigate on resources and VM inventory. The ‘recent alarms’ and ‘history reports’ found on the same snapshot page allow quick troubleshooting of problems e.g. an alarm on high CPU utilization leads to the reports showing which core CPU peaked and which VM contributed most at that time.

Quickly identify resource hungry VMs and take corrective action

Administrators can quickly identify problematic VMs through the ‘top VM’ lists and then drill down to identify the offending process or application that is affecting application performance. With more than 70 VMware monitors such as CPU Wait/ Ready, Memory Balloon/ Shared/ Swapped/ Overhead etc. OpManager ensures identification and elimination of potential VM problems.

Get over 70 built-in reports on VMware infrastructure performance

OpManager provides over 70 out-of-the-box reports on CPU, memory, disk and network utilization for every host and VM. These reports can be exported in pdf and xls format and come handy in troubleshooting utilization spikes(try the CPU utilization per VM report alongside CPU ready time reports), identifying resource utilization trends and in making the right capacity addition decisions. All the ‘top’ reports can be scheduled and automatically emailed to desired recipients.